Dining Etiquette - Gender

My post last week on Chinese Dining Etiquette inspired a number of very interesting comments about how people deal with the expectations and obligations around paying for a meal when going out with Chinese friends and family. A couple of them got me thinking more about the social and cultural dilemma around paying for meals in the context of the gender divide. Do women feel the same social pressure to offer to pay for a meal as men do, whether they are from an eastern culture or a western one?

Back in the old days, before women’s lib, it was the expectation and duty that the man paid, if a man and a woman went out to a meal together. (I am thinking here of Western culture from around the 1930s through to the 1960s, which would be my parents and grandparents generation. I am not clear as to what would have happened in East — whether it would have been acceptable for a single woman to go out for a meal with a single man during that period in Asian culture. If anyone can share their experience of that from an Asian perspective, that would be great!) My parents completed their higher education in the UK in the 1950s, which is where they met and dated, so the Western tradition played its part in their courtship. Growing up in that context in the 1960s, that was certainly the etiquette that I absorbed.

However, I came of age in the 1980s, when the women’s lib of the lates 60s and 70s had evolved into out-and-out feminism and young women now fully expected to have careers of their own. That was the era of women’s power suits and I remember an ad for Charlie perfume that featured a beautiful woman striding into a stuffy gentlemen’s club dressed in a sleek three-piece trousersuit with a tie. At university, I had long discussions with my girl friends about the etiquette of paying for a meal. Should we offer to pay for our half of a meal when we went out with a young man? Should we pay for the whole meal? Or should we play the demure young lady and let the man pay, just like in the old days?

It was generally agreed that if we paid for the whole meal, it would threaten the manhood of our date, framing us as a scary/ ballsy feminist types who would emasculate him and so frighten him away forever. But if we let him pay the whole tab, we agonised, would that mean that we would be seen as weak little women who would feel obliged to sleep with him - because the implication was that we would have surrendered all our power to him by surrendering to his greater masculine wallet?

So “going Dutch” would seem to be the most sensible option but there were still worries about what message this signalled: would we be saying that we were “just friends” and lose any opportunity of the relationship developing into something more intimate in the future? For some of my girlfriends, sharing the tab with a man still felt too forcefully as if they were asserting equal rights with men and therefore pushing our “feminist values “on him. And no one wanted to be seen as a feminist — because feminists were all men-hating, shorthaired, hairy-legged, angry, unreasonable lunatics, weren’t they? And so these tricky questions occupied us late into our student nights.

These days, 20 years on, I don’t think about the issue very much at all. Sometimes I pay for the whole meal, sometimes I share the bill and at other times, I gracefully accept a meal paid for by someone else. This is partly because the whole dating issue is no longer on the table, so to speak, so that particular aspect doesn’t come into play. Amongst my friends and close family, there is no game-playing or status-flexing needed, so if someone pays this time, someone else offers to pay next time and it all comes out in the wash. And gender no longer seems relevant in any of it.

I wonder, however, whether the dilemmas we had back in the 80s arose because we were all young and uncertain at that time of our lives or whether we were living through a transition time for women. Did young men at that time really feel threatened if a woman paid for part or all of the bill, as we girls worried so much about? Did they really expect to get into bed with us more easily if they paid the bill or was that just an anxiety on our part? Similarly, do I feel more relaxed about these things now because I am older or because I don’t have to date anymore or because women have reached greater economic parity with men in our modern times? I am not sure. Maybe it’s a combination of all the above?

What are your thoughts? I hope you will add a comment…

Photo: thanks to goonjrulz from flickr.com (CCL)